Bible Lesson 140
The Cost of Discipleship
“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost?” Luke 14:26-33
“IF THE WORLD HATE YOU, YE KNOW THAT IT HATED ME BEFORE IT HATED YOU.” JESUS CHRIST, JOHN 15:18
Part and parcel of the cost of discipleship is that those who are truly saved, born again and obedient, will be hated by those who are worldly, and We have the Savior’s promise of that in John 15:18. We always have to qualify what we say when we speak about those who are truly saved; because so many people have been corrupted by cheap grace preaching and made to believe that they were saved because they had joined some church group, made a profession of faith, or thought themselves good enough.
Salvation is of God and unless and until God sends His Holy Spirit to awaken a soul that is dead in trespass and sin, nobody is ever saved, (Ephesians 2:1-4; John 3:16-21; John 6:44; Romans 6:3-14; Romans 8:1-11; Ephesians 1:3-14). If you read and understand the verses listed above, you have to understand that our society is one that has not simply failed to read and study the Revelation of our God (Bible), we have completely thrown out the Bible and have made up another gospel which, in fact, is no gospel at all.
Oh, we know that it looks good for pastors to open a Bible and read a verse or two before they preach; but how they read and handle the precious word of God is such that those who hear it are only affirmed in their unbelief and sin. We have become lazy and as a result we have often missed God completely, because we have thought that we are safe in believing what we hear preached. God’s Word, the Bible, is the only place that we can find God and the faith that is His gift to those who earnestly seek His face. God speaks to us and tells us that we are saved by God’s grace, through faith in His One and Only Son Jesus Christ, and that faith comes from hearing the truth. (Ephesians 2:8-9; John 3:16-21; Romans 10:17; John 8:30-32). When we think of the truth in a Biblical sense, we must think of it as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Over the past decades we have learned that the only way that people will listen and join our ranks is for us to tell them what they want to hear, and what people today want to hear is what makes them feel good about themselves regardless of the blackness of their hearts. Any one who thinks that we have not become a nation of whiners, fakers and deniers of the truth are just not awake and aware.
Our culture indicates the truth of what I say. When we have men in our highest political offices who establish a pattern of lying and cheating and just plain hedonism, it is time that we all stopped and examined where we are headed. In case anybody is interested, we are as the old preacher Vance Havner used to say when speaking of the denominations and churches, ” We are many, but we are not much”.
That brings us to our discussion today, we must think back a few years, possibly before most of you were ever born; because if we don’t, we will not believe the horrible condition that we have allowed the visible church to become. We are a people who are so tolerant that we have allowed the church to become a workshop for the devil. Understand now, I’m speaking broadly and I pray that not all churches are like so many that I know of. These churches all have pastors who are people pleasers and they have charmed the devil and his minions to become members of the visible church, and have allowed them to gain social acceptance to the point that the visible church has absolutely no authority in it’s community. Ask yourself ‘.if you have ever seen anyone walk to the front of the church and some kind of ‘profession of faith’, and then told that they would have to wait and prove themselves or in any way denied church membership’
Chances are that none of you have ever experienced that, so what does that say to the community that we are supposed to be teaching to obey Christ (Matthew 28:19-20). It gives me no happiness to have to speak these truths other than that I know I am obeying Christ; and someone has to stand in the gap and tell the truth regardless of how many people today will not believe the truth. The truth (Knowledge of the gospel) is, that thing that sets you free; and if you are not willing to accept the gospel according to Jesus, then you are not willing to be saved by His blood, and death.
Sadly, our society and our culture and our churches have been so focused upon everything except the Bible and it’s truths, that we no longer know if we believe, what we believe and why we believe it. We have been conditioned to think that what salvation means is having your name on some churches roles. We really do not have much knowledge about the Bible and we tend to operate and exist upon our favorite preachers ideas about what the Bible teaches and it doesn’t matter to us as long as we belong to that church and make some kind of churchy noise now and then.
We have based our eternal souls security upon platitudes and sound bites and vague ideals, and we slide in to hell with no idea about why we are there. What does your church and what do you believe about salvation. Where does your salvation come from and how does it effect you and your personal life. Most church members in our day believe that we don’t really need to understand the Bible. They believe it to be antiquated and out of date and hard to understand. What they don’t teach you in the church is that it is impossible to really understand without the help of the Holy Spirit.
The carnal mind, the mind that is set on pleasing the flesh, will not subject itself to the will of God and so it will never understand what God demands from His children (Romans 8:5-7). Most have been taught that Jesus died for everyone, and that Jesus loves everybody just the way that they are. Those are both outright lies and the Bible clearly shows us that they are lies. If you believe Jesus Christ loves you, then compare yourself to the scriptures. In the gospel of John Chapter 14 and verses 21-24;’ Jesus is speaking to His disciples ‘Then and now’ and Jesus says ‘..”He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him. That was said by the Savior in verse 21, and you can read the rest of those verses for yourself, and as you read, remember that God saves us by His grace, but He never saves anyone unless He completely changes them from the inside out.
The verse that I quoted there (verse 21 of John 14) makes it clear that God’s love is for those who love Him enough to obey Him. You can mark that down and remember that you will never know the love of God until you have dealt with the Wrath of God against your sins. Now let’s look at who Jesus Christ died for. Hebrews 5:8-9 tells us, speaking of Jesus: “Though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. And having been perfected He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.” Notice now, that does not say that Christ died for everyone’it says that He died for those who obey Him! The question now for us is, did Jesus die for me’ The answer is will you obey Him. The next question becomes, does Christ love and does the Father love me’ The answer is in John 14:21-24, and it tells us plainly that He loves those who love Him enough to obey Him.
I say what I say with all the humility and love that I can muster, but much of what the professing church of our day must hear will not sound like love. We have allowed ourselves to be lead astray, and we have endangered our eternal souls by doing so. What we must do it seems, is to set everything else aside and make time and take time to read and study the Bible, all of it, until we read an understanding of what God has done and is doing in this world. We must be willing to admit that we have been wrong in that we were willing to listen, but were not willing to research and know the Scriptures for ourselves. You may ask, well is brobob, pointing to every preacher and pastor today and saying that they are leading people astray’
I tell you right now, I am not saying that all of them are completely wrong but the numbers that are, would be mighty high. Most of them do not realize that they are preaching false doctrines, but that is because they were fooled about the truth while they were preparing for the ministry in seminaries that were loaded with people who were practical atheist. I know that is hard to hear but it is the truth and if you have been listening to so many of them, you have to know that they are missing the Bible and missing God in what they have to teach. God did not send His Son Jesus Christ to die on the cross so that young men could take the mantel of ‘men of God’ and confuse and change and make the gospel acceptable to sinners. God gave us the Bible to change men and make them acceptable to God. Now to our subject for today’.the cost of discipleship. I realize that you have probably always heard that there is no cost to be saved, no cost to be a Christian; and that is correct if you think about what you have to do to be saved. We add nothing to what God did to save us; however there is a cost to having been saved. Most are happy to join some church and claim that since everything is free and apparently God doesn’t care how we live, and settle the questions concerning judgment and eternity for ever without ever breaking a sweat; however that dog won’t hunt! There is cost to those who have experienced the gift of God’s grace through faith in His Son Jesus Christ. Let me repeat, we do not have to do anything for our salvation; but we do have a cost once we have truly been saved.
By the time you have read to this point in this lesson you have probably asked yourself ‘what Bible has brobob been reading. The answer is the same one that most people have been neglecting. We have heard the softball verses and promise verses of the Bible from all of our pulpits but very few really ever preach those hard verses like we have quoted so far in this lesson. We seem to like the fact that Jesus says, ” Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden , and I will give you rest.” That is a welcome sound but Jesus continues in the next verse there and says “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” Jesus does indeed invite all who hear His gospel to come to Him; but He also says that there is a yoke involved and a yoke is something that binds you to Him.
It leads you the same way that He goes and you work as you pull the load alongside Him. We have decided that since Jesus commands us to come to him to find rest, that all we have to do is to make the motions involved in coming for salvation but that is not what the Bible teaches. We have to understand the Bible in it’s context and there is much more said by the Savior than ‘come to me’. Jesus goes on in Luke chapter 14 to explain how we come and you don’t hear much about that lately. In Luke 14:26-33, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, says to us that there is a certain way that we must come. Those verses tell us that if we truly come to Him, we must come loving Him more than we love our father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, ‘and ourselves! Christ styles that warning in verse 26 this way ‘.we must love him so much more than we love ourselves, our families and anything else in this world, that our love for self and family and things will look like hate.
Don’t be confused because we know in the context of the Word of God that God expects us to love our fathers and mothers, children, or siblings, but not nearly as much as we love Him. Those verses speak of dying to self and worldly things when it says we must take up our cross and follow Him. But what we have to realize is that when we come to Christ for salvation it is because God has brought us from death to life (Ephesians 2:1-10), and from that point on God does it all. It was God who planned salvation, it was His One and Only Son Jesus Christ that purchased it for those who would obey Him, and it is the Holy Spirit that takes up residence in us and applies the benefits of salvation to us.
There are not many today who have ever heard that; because preachers have become afraid of those hard facts, but that does not change what God has said. Are you willing to die to self and all of self’s prejudices, programs, plans and purposes and have Jesus Christ rule over your life as He and He alone can accomplish what God has required’.which is the fact that we must be perfect in the eyes of the Father. That does not happen when a person joins one of the visible churches, or makes a profession of faith. As we said before being saved means dying and what we die to is sin and the law. We don’t die physically but Spiritually we die twice. First we die to sin, as we are told in Romans 6:1-14. God places His Holy Spirit in those whom He saves and the Holy Spirit works in us to bring us to the realization that we have been saved and that we are able to, in the power of God, walk in newness of life. We are dead to sin and sin is dead to us. We begin to hate sin and avoid sin at all costs.
We become slaves to Christ and we obey Him and we hate sin because He hates sin. Then we die to the law (Romans 7:4-6); because we are under Grace and the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2). Does that mean that we are free to do as we like without any consequence’ Absolutely not. I don’t know why anyone who has been under the hand of God and is saved would ever think such a thing as that. We are not the old man attempting to sand-bag God as we live reprobate lives, rather we are saints and that is the reason that God calls anyone to salvation: We are called of God and saved to be saints. (Romans 1:7). Did Jesus Christ ever sin and disobey the Father’ You know that He did not, and that same Jesus has given us His Spirit to lead and guide and teach us, so to sin would be to violate our nature, as that new creature that is raised up in true salvation. We who are truly saved and Children of God can say with the Apostle Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who lives, but Christ lives in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and give Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Who has said that we should count the cost of discipleship, before we seek Christ and His salvation’ The answer is, it was and is, Christ Himself (Luke 14:28).
Our society and our religious efforts tend to make it easy for anyone and everyone to be saved. We have devised a mechanical formula or two that if we perform we will be told that we are saved and we are made members of the visible church; however we must come to the knowledge that there are no mechanical formulas in the Word of God and what we learn from the Word of God is that we are saved only one way and that is by God’s grace, through faith in His Son Jesus Christ. We have no part in our salvation, it is the work of God from beginning to the end: it definitely is not something that we could or would ‘decide’ to do. God decides and God works it all out and conditions those who are truly saved to agree and to follow God’s leading from the first to the last. Jesus Christ who purchased our salvation on the cross, is God’s gift to those who will believe; and in that new birth, where the dead are brought to Spiritual life, God recreates us as new creatures ‘in Christ’. Those who receive Christ are born again and it is not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:12-13).
God decides who will be saved and God provides all that is needed in our salvation. Salvation is not pushed by God to anyone but rather Christ Himself always showed those who profess a desire to follow Him, that it was not an easy life, because of the cost of following Him. If you know your Bible and believe it, look at what Jesus told one of the Scribes who came to Him and said ‘Teacher, I will follow You wherever you go.”
Jesus did not encourage him or take him in as a disciple, Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head’ (Matthew 8:20). Then another of His disciples said to Him, ‘Lord, let me first go and bury my father’, but Jesus said to him, ‘Follow Me, and let the dead bury their own dead’ (Matthew 8:21-22). Jesus in both of those instances was pointing out some of the cost of being His disciple; and He said that hardships and even instances where family ties would suffer. We can no longer live for ourselves if we would be a Christian, we live through Jesus and He lives through us. There may even be times that those who are rich and powerful may have to give up their riches to follow Christ; because riches are sometimes a hindrance to our faithfulness. Take for instance the case of the rich young ruler that came to Jesus, and asked ‘Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life”. Jesus told him to keep the commandments, which he said he had always done, then Jesus told him to go, sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. This young man thought about what Jesus had required of him and he went away sorrowful, because he would not put Christ first in his life, instead choosing his riches (Matthew 19:16-22).
The Bible does not bar the rich from heaven but it does require those who follow Jesus to love Him more than they love their riches. Yes, there are great cost to following the Savior and being saved, among them you will have to put Christ before everyone and everything on the earth, you will be hated because the world hated Him and it will hate you because you walk and talk and look like Christ (John 15:18). I am afraid that we have softened and perverted the Word of God to the point that most people really believe that salvation is something that we say or something that we do; however, salvation equates to something that God has done in and on us. Those who are truly saved are people who are dramatically changed from the world. We live in the world, but we do not live like the world. How is that possible’ Only through that miracle of rebirth that can and is done only by God. Salvation involves all of God and it involves all of the person who is ever saved. We are changed from the inside out, and God changes our minds, our hearts our tongues and our disposition. We said before that we die in true salvation, we die to sin and rather than live under sin’s rule we live under God’s rule.
We are dead to the law of God, and both sin and law are dead to us. In the older dispensations, whenever a person was guilty of murder, they would take the person whom the murderer had killed and tie them to the one who had murdered them. Then the murderer would be forced to live tied to that dead body . Doesn’t sound like it would be pleasant does it’ Well, then why do you suppose that so many church members live that way’ Most church members today would argue that the saved person lives as that old man is still alive and that God has moved in to live with him. That doesn’t make good sense does it’ God hates sin and the old man was a man of flesh and lived in the flesh because of Adam’s sin nature that we all inherit at birth. God puts that old man (flesh) to death in salvation and raises up a new creature who can and does obey.
It has always been the law that incites death to us by showing us that we cannot keep it. We who are saved are not under the law, but under grace, (Romans 6:14). We are in Christ Jesus and He never knew any sin whatsoever, so the law no longer holds us hostage to death. We are free to serve God as we live, or Jesus lives through us and we keep the law out of love. Where there is no law, there is no sin (Romans 5:13). We have to be careful here to not give people the idea that the law no longer exists because it does; because we are saved to keep us from sin, not to allow it as non-chargeable to those who commit sin. Never think that God saves us and then looks the other way when we sin, instead God saves us and recreates us in Jesus Christ, and give us the power of God to resist sin in all it’s forms. The true Christian can sin, but He has a mind that won’t allow it and the Holy Spirit to empower him not to sin.
In order for the truly saved person to sin, they must first deny Christ, crawl over his bruised and beaten dead body, over the Cross where He was hung, through the precious blood that He shed, over the prayers of the saints and the desire of his brothers in Christ: having said that it would seem to be just too much trouble for those who have been redeemed to sin. The Christian has no place to hide if they sin; because God did not send His One and Only Son, Jesus Christ to die on the cross to give us a pass to sin. Shame on anyone who would think like that! The saved are people of the Spirit, not people of the flesh. Christians have a different mind than people of the flesh. The flesh runs after things that will please the flesh but Christians live to please the Spirit.
We will have a good start to come back toward the truth, if we have understood what has been said up to now in this lesson. If we can come to the point that we realize that we are simply creatures while God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Savior of those who obey. Further, God will be the Judge, who will not only judge but will cast those who for whatever reason failed to ask, seek, and knock, for the answer to depravity and sin. Who can and will be saved’ According to the Bible, God, before the foundation of the world, chose or elected some that would be saved, in time. Those were not elected, were not passed by because of anything that they were or would become, or anything that they would do.
God elected, because He chose to choose. There are no marks to indicate to us who was elected and who was not, so we all begin even with God. We are all born dead in trespass and sin, under the wrath of our Holy God because of our sin nature that was passed down from our great grandfather Adam. So rather than do like so many spoiled children in our day, do not draw back and complain that God is not fair because He didn’t elect everyone’..you begin to read your Bible and cry out to God to save you and if you are determined to obey all that you find in the Bible, you will be saved. So many people in our time, want to play the part of prima-donnas, who want God to answer to them rather than them answering to God. My fervent pray and heart’s desire that people will begin to seek the face of our Sovereign God, realizing that He spoke everything that we know into being, bowing our knees and our hearts to the Almighty as we read and study His inspired, inerrant, infallible Word, the Bible.
Until next time,
may God bless and keep you
This is Bro. Bob